NASCAR dads. "My core issue now is: you could have a hockey fan in the White House," Leary said. "How great would it be to turn on the television and see some people skating on an outdoor rink on the South Lawn? I'd be there. I'd help shovel, too." The bad news for Demo- crats? Hockey is not a red -state sport. And Canadians can't vote. -Ben McGrath THIRD PERIOD PUCK FLICK F ew things rate higher on the dork meter than going to see "Miracle" with a hockey stick in your hands. "Mir- acle," of course, is the new movie about the United States hockey team's upset of the Soviets at the 1980 Winter Olympic Games, in Lake Placid. Though it may be routine, at a movie like this, to get choked up or even to cheer, it is not ad- visable to show up wearing or carrying hockey equipment of any kind. One man who tried this the other night, at a theatre on East Eighty-sixth Street-he couldn't help stickhandling kernels of spilled popcorn in the aisle--attracted a range of withering, befuddled glances. For his wife, the embarrassment abated -. -.. " "" ' ç1- :X, \ ) ê i \ ' J . r _!J1 , * -. -" Il . . " ..' . t ) ; i- .,( *"!'. .J) : ? *;i? ',;. ..:::::.::. .' '0. :*-;; oilly when the show began. "This is a date?" she whispered. A few weeks ago, Igor Larionov; the New Jersey Devil and former Soviet star, who has been called the Russian Gretzky; decided that he needed to see the film. He went to a multiplex near his house, in Short Hills, with his wife and his young son, but they wanted to see something else. "So I went by myse " Larionov said the other day; in the Devils' locker room after practice. "I think I was the last guy to come into the theatre. The place was :full. It was a1readydark"Nobodyin the theatre seemed to recognize him, in part because he is just a hockey player, and also because he hardly looks like a professional athlete: he is short and compact, with a thoughtfiù, boyish expression that, along with a profi- ciency at chess and an occasional quoting of Pushkin and the wire-rimmed glasses that he wears away from the rink, has earned him another nickname-the Pro- fessor. He was among the first Russians to come to play in the National Hockey League, fourteen years ago. Now; at forty- three, he's the oldest player in the N .H.L. In 1980, Larionov was a little too green to play on the Soviet team at Lake Placid, but he remembers the occasion well. "The guys who didn't make the na- tional team, we were in Kiev at a tourna- ment, to try to stay busy;" he said. "I found out in the morning. I was shocked. Somebody said, at breakfast, 'The Rus- sians lost last night.' I guess the Voice of t !) / ") :: .- .' ,r/; \ f[ MEN 0 P A U $ E AND THE CITY] \ t America said it. I thought, There's no chance anybody could beat that team. I decided, I'm not gonna believe it until I watch the game at seven o'clock They showed the game on tape delay; because people were going to work during the da)!. You were not supposed to know the result. So that night I started watching. With five or seven minutes left to go, I started to believe: they're losing the game. It was, like, a war, and all of a sudden we lost a battle--a crucial battle of the war." Larionov crossed the locker room to change the channel on a TV set above the door, from ESPN to CNBC, in order to check on his stocks. "I t's been every fucking single day; you guys talking about that game," he went on. Before coming to New Jersey; last summer, Larionov spent eight years on the Red Wings, in Detroit, where his teammates called him Iggy. (N .H.L. nicknames are governed by an esoteric set of Mes, one being that the long "e" sound is removed from names that have it, and added to those that do not. Thus, Gretzky is Gretz, and Clarke is Clarkie.) Several times a year, the Lake Placid game was rebroadcast on cable. Without fail, a teammate, Brendan Shanahan, would come in the next day and call out, "Iggy; you watch the game last night?" "Who was playing?" Larionovwould ask "U.S.A. - Russia! It was a miracle!" ''Jesus, Shanny; I wasn't there, so don't k " as me. At the multiplex, Larionov said, he had sat quietly; admiring the approach, as it was depicted in "Miracle," of the American coach, Herb Brooks. He heard Brooks use the old Russian expression "The legs feed the wolf" and saw his compatriots depicted, as usual, as tal- ented but humorless automatons. He was caught up in the movie, riding the emotion. He liked the stof)T. ' A.t the end of the movie, there was a standing ovation in the theatre," Larionov said. "I just left. To be honest, I felt like I'd lost. My friends played there-Krutov, Makarov, Fetisov, Kasatonov. I wish the guys in Hollywood had spent more time, maybe even just five minutes, to show the Russian side of the story They should have showed a little bit of what happened inside the Soviet camp. But I know American movies are always like that." -Nick Paumgarten